Syndication

Being aware of death influences our money behavior. The research about this behavior is intriguing and instructional—and very important to understand for those of us who work with clients and their money. As a quick and partial overview of what researchers have learned, read "Grim Givers: How Thoughts of Death Open Wallets" (New York Observer). Excerpt:

Yet we humans are practical animals. When confronted with the terrifying vision of our own expiration date, we get to work. We create meaning in our lives by reinforcing our cultural values, erecting buildings, making art, teaching—and writing charitable checks.

There’s even a hypothesis for this. With the alarming name Terror Management Theory, it’s the brainchild of academics Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski, who’ve been investigating it for over 25 years.

The idea—set out in their forthcoming book, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life—is that knowledge of our own death (“mortality salience,” as it’s known) is a powerful force shaping our actions, behaviors and beliefs.

A new study from North Carolina State University and the University of Texas finds that children pay close attention to issues related to money, and that parents should make an effort to talk with their children to ensure that kids don’t develop misconceptions about finance.

“We wanted to know what kids are learning, or not learning, about money from their parents,” says Dr. Lynsey Romo, an assistant professor of communication at NC State and lead author of a paper on the research. “This is one of the first studies to look at what young school-age children know about money. The only other studies we’ve seen that address this issue focused on some high school and mostly college students.”

The researchers conducted interviews with 136 children between the ages of eight and 17, with an average age of 10.5. Fifty-seven percent of the children were boys; 43 percent were girls.

“Broadly speaking, we found that parents were most likely to talk with their kids about saving, spending and earning,” Romo says. The children said they felt their parents talked about these subjects to prepare kids for the future.

The children also reported that some subjects were largely “off-limits,” including family finances, parental income, investments and debt. For the most part, the children said they weren’t sure why parents didn’t want to talk about these subjects. However, some children said they thought parents didn’t want to discuss these topics because parents were afraid of scaring their children, or of having the children brag about their family’s finances or compare their financial circumstances with other families.

“The takeaway here is that even young kids are aware of financial issues, regardless of whether parents talk with them about money,” Romo says. “And if parents aren’t talking with their kids about subjects like family finances or debt, the kids are drawing their own conclusions – which may not be accurate. Even if parents don’t want to discuss family finances with their children, it may be worthwhile to explain why they don’t want to discuss that topic.”

The study also found that, while parents often didn’t talk about investments, they were statistically far more likely to talk to their sons about investing than they were to talk to their daughters about the subject. Similarly, parents were more likely to talk to boys about debt.

The same organization Dying Matters has announced a new creative writing competition. From the Web page:

Life is shockingly unpredictable and too often ends before we’ve told our nearest and dearest how much we love them, registered a will to avoid chaos after we’ve gone, visited a long-neglected relative or got in touch with someone we know we treated badly. Omissions like these gnaw at us now and are likely to be bitterly regretted when we face the final curtain.

So with that in mind, our new writing competition, While There’s Still Time, is aimed at generating shared experiences that will help more people set about putting things right, planning their future and getting the best from the rest of their life. Reading about other people’s setbacks, sadness and happiness helps us cope with our own ups and downs, and writing about experiences too painful to talk about can in itself generate a wonderful sense relief and release.

By talking more openly about end of life issues and taking actions such as writing a will, recording our funeral wishes, registering as an organ donor, planning our future care and sharing what we would want with our loved ones we can help to ensure that we all get the chance to live well until we die.

You only die once, so don’t leave it too late to make your wishes known or to provide support to those who need it.

Because I believe the flow from ancestry to life to legacy is important—often extremely influential on how we live our lives and affect future generations—I sometimes post about that flow. (Click here or here, for example, and watch for an interview at idealawg on this topic soon.)

[S]ince I believe it is so important for generations to share their stories, I looked for a way to make it more affordable." And [April Bell] did. With partner Urs Brauchli she developed a $2.99 iPhone app called Story Catcher that was released in 2013.

"I used the app on my phone and created this little narrative about how I met my wife," says longtime Lafayette resident Dennis Erokan, founder of BAM Magazine who met Bell at a Lafayette Chamber of Commerce meeting. "Then I shared the story with one of my daughters." He said that his daughter was so moved that she started to cry; she had never heard the whole story.

The app allows people to record a video approximately two minutes long; users can access templates, if they want, to add pictures and subtitles, and create a very nice and professional looking product that can be shared with others.

Some new research on nostalgia is getting a lot of media coverage. For some reason, the topic of nostalgia seems particularly fitting to me as we approach the holiday season. If you have an interest in nostalgia, here are some links for you.

Historically, nostalgia has been viewed as a disease of the brain or the mind. However, in recent years, nostalgia has received a conceptual rehabilitation due to a revival of scholarly interest accompanied by the use of contemporary empirical methods. Drawing upon this recent work, we propose that nostalgia is an important resource for psychological health and well-being. We begin by detailing the characteristics of the nostalgic experience and then discuss a wide range of studies demonstrating that psychological threat triggers nostalgia, nostalgia enhances psychological health and well-being, and nostalgia promotes adaptive psychological functioning among individuals at risk for poor mental health. We also highlight the need for future research on nostalgia’s relation to psychological health.

I will be on my colleague Gail Rubin's radio show A Good Goodbye October 30, at 4 Mountain, 6 Eastern. Listen in here. If you cannot listen in at that time, a recording will be available afterwards at the same link.

October 30 is the 14th annual Create a Great Funeral Day; the interview is in honor of that holiday. I registered the day well over a decade ago to remind people to consider the benefits of creating your own funeral or memorial service, regardless of age of state of health.

Why would you want to make those plans? Just a few reasons:

You relieve those you leave behind of many decisions during their time of grief.

You give the bereaved the emotional satisfaction of knowing they are carrying out your wishes.

You may open up new areas of discussion with your family.

You are able to create an event that truly reflects your life.

Reviewing your life for the purpose of creating the service allows you to evaluate how you want to use your future.

And this gentle reminder of your mortality has an effect on your decisions about today.

For some previous blog posts about creating your own funeral, click here. For more about my book on the topic, go here.

According to the so-called Buddenbrooks syndrome, substantial differences can arise in managing and running a family business across generations. The first generation of proprietors supposedly possesses the pioneering character, striving for money and creating a successful business. The second generation, it is alleged, exerts itself in strengthening the firm and increasing its recognition and social prestige. The third generation sometimes lacks dedication to the management of the family business, preferring leisure and non-productive activities. In fact, German Nobel Prize–winner Thomas Mann‘s novel Buddenbrooks itself shows that this usual understanding of the Buddenbrooks syndrome is incorrect. Fiction provides an excellent way to analyze family business. It is possible to establish a classification of different models based on significant features of family firms in literature, as I attempt to do in this essay.

The Goodwin Games might be a fun show to watch. Whether you watch or not, the article describing the new comedy makes some good points about legacy and inheritance. Excerpt:

The Goodwin Games, a new Fox TV comedy starring Beau Bridges, is a little wacky but it makes a vital personal finance point between laughs: Parents should ensure their children will inherit their estates as they wish, of course, but it’s equally important – maybe even more important – that they pass on their values.

How are you doing on that score?

An intriguing finding that caught my eye in the recent survey of people over 45, Americans’ Perspectives on New Retirement Realities and the Longevity Bonus, from Merrill Lynch and the Age Wave consulting firm, really underscores this view.

The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old's "pencil-holding deficiency," hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — "helicopter parents," teachers christened us ... ."

But the hovering behavior does not only go down the family tree, it also flies up into the parent branches. Adult children are overprotecting their aging parents. I suppose we can call a person doing this up-the-tree overprotecting a "helicopter child."

The motivations for hovering over and around one's parent are many. Just four are mentioned in "Overprotective children do more harm than good" (Gainesville Sun): old-age myths, the widowed parent, reparenting your parents, and emotional baggage. A bit of elaboration on these four reasons adult children overprotect . . .

One of our culture's old-age myths is that cognitive decline is inevitable. Children who believe this may infantilize their parents, not accurately assessing their parents' abilities and capacity for autonomy.

When one parent dies, adult children may move in "too fast" in an effort to be supportive.

Popular wisdom tells us that roles are reversed as parents age so that we as adult children become the parents. This reversal is not really accurate because the dynamics are different. Nevertheless, this misconception can lead children to attempt to parent their parents.

Conflicts that developed in the past may influence how the child treats the aging parent, so that the child's behavior does not fit the situation or the needs of the parent.

Of course, there are many other reasons a child may hover. A few that come to mind right now: need to be needed, guilt, tendency to martyrdom, or lack of ability to listen to or read the parent.

The balance between autonomy and support is a delicate one in any relationship. In the case of aging parents, that balance can be particularly challenging. And there are ways to frame the challenge that can make it easier.